WE SHOW BEES PLAYING FOOTBALL
In his new series, Animal Einsteins, Chris Packham shines a light on some of the animal kingdom’s savviest species. EMMA JOHNSON finds out more
ANIMALS have to be smart to survive and Chris Packham sets out to show us just how smart they can be in his groundbreaking new BBC series, Animal Einsteins. Using new science and innovative techniques, the 59-year-old reveals the natural world’s surprising brainboxes and uncovers the clever strategies that give certain species the upper hand.
What can viewers expect from Animal Einsteins?
I THINK there are going to be a lot of surprises. There are quite a lot of wow moments, there are stories here which are going to stop people in their tracks and get them to completely rethink the way that they probably consider other animals’ intelligence.
And I think the reason for that is that there’s a lot of good new science. Given the advances in technology that we have, this has led our scientists to have a wide range of access to understand species’ behaviour.
Which do you think is the most intelligent animal that you encountered on the series?
WELL clearly it was all the scientists doing the experiments, but if we take out the humans, [it] would be the raven.
The raven was presented with a challenge that it hadn’t seen before. The first time it took about a minute and 15 seconds, and then the second time it did it in about 45 seconds.
But what we didn’t show was that once the raven had figured it out, it just kept doing it again and again and again, because it was getting the reward.
In the end, it was doing it in about 15 seconds, after about four goes. So it’s not only that it had the capacity to solve the problem initially, it also has the capacity to hone its problemsolving ability so it could do it more effectively.
What are some of the scientific discoveries that have come out of the series?
WE’VE got the bees that can count, obviously. That’s been done at Queen Mary, University of London.
We go on to show them playing football, which is a bit of a gag. But the key thing is that these animals can count.
Planning ahead is another thing that we’ve looked at. The cuttlefish, they plan for the future. So they choose to have a lighter lunch if they know that there’s a chance that they could get a bigger dinner. That ability to predict the future is again a tremendous sign of intelligence, because currently we don’t know of too many species that can do that.
Do you have any particular highlights from the series?
I LIKE animals that are better at doing things than we are.
So the chimpanzees, you show them something for a fraction of a second and then in a fraction of a space of time their short-term memory is so strong that they’re able to relocate all the things that you’ve just shown them.
Even things like budgies, everyone thinks of them as a little caged bird that your grandmother used to keep, but new science there has shown that the females will chose the brighter males, the more intelligent males, so there’s lots going on that we don’t know.
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